Tag Archives: review

Primary Trust

26 Jun

To misquote Gandhi, We’re all children of God, it’s just that some of us are more childlike than others.

Kenneth is such a person.

Gentle, hesitant, uncertain, he lives a plain life and keeps to himself. He works at a second-hand bookstore. Every night he goes to Wally’s and drinks Mai Tais with his only friend, Bert. It’s difficult for Kenneth to imagine Life without Bert – and that’s curious, because Life doesn’t give many of us a Bert after the age of four. (Bert is the only character in Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize winning play who transcends – in his own wondrous way – the inescapable doubts and wistful regrets of this sublunary world.)

When Kenneth’s bookshop is sold, he’s worried how he’ll find employment. (He got his first job only thanks to a social worker.) At the advice of Corrina from Wally’s, he applies for a position at a bank with the evocative name Primary Trust. According to Kenneth, the manager employs him because he reminds him of his brain-damaged brother.

As his friendship with Corrina develops, his special relationship with Bert changes, in a way that’s confronting (for Kenneth) but beautiful and hopeful.

The supreme importance of relationships like friendship is emphasised by an exquisitely simple speech by Corrina about her best friend, Denise. Corrina loves Denise. We don’t know why: in fact, we know virtually nothing about the briefly mentioned and never seen Denise – except that she doesn’t look after her cat as well as she might. But sometimes, when Corrina thinks about Denise, she cries. Perhaps this sounds sentimental? I think Corrina is just being honest, and being honest with Kenneth is life-changing. It’s this sort of openness that helps him find the connections he so desperately needs.

Primary Trust is an absolutely delightful comedy, informed by a sense of small town dagginess reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. (The set, by James Browne, with a back wall of many coloured doors emphasises this sense of the parochial presented playfully.) But unlike Wilder’s play, this story is one character’s (Kenneth’s), and the view from eternity that warmly infuses the conclusion of Our Town is absent, replaced by the vision, courageous and true, that the only heaven there is we must find here, amongst the struggling souls who surround us.

Except for one alluded-to-but-not-expanded-upon instance of racial injustice, the world around Kenneth is not malignant, only forgetful. (Or a little too complaisant: The sky is blue, what can you do?) But a little reaching out goes a long way.

Yes, it’s an exploration of trauma, highlighting the humanity of those who suffer – but what the play primarily offers is not a portrait of pain but rather models of kindness (the consistent, persistent type that engenders trust.)

Directed by Darren Yap, performances are gorgeously engaging. As Kenneth, Albert Mwangi is superb, both immensely likeable and poignantly pathetic. With a compassionate charisma, Charles Allen plays Bert, wonderfully portraying the perpetual patience and positivity of the best friend of our dreams. Angela Mahlatjie’s Corrina is magnificent: honest and humble yet hopeful; softly unassuming and utterly soul-expanding. And she and Peter Kowitz do some hilarious doubling, with Kowitz’s bank manager true comic gold. Booth’s script –which captures the wavering richness of real speech – calls for virtuoso vocal work, and the cast delivers (aided, no doubt, by the remarkable skills of dialect coach Linda Nicholls-Gidley.)

This Ensemble production is a glorious invitation to laugh, and an irresistible reminder of our shared humanity.

Paul Gilchrist

Primary Trust by Eboni Booth

at Ensemble until 12 July

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Aphrodite

22 Jun

Ava, an academic, has written a book entitled The Aphrodite Complex. It’s been sufficiently successful that a documentary has been filmed about the subject. During the making of this documentary, Ava becomes aware that a particular member of the crew – Hector – appears to be fascinated by her.

After the shoot, waiting at Athens International Airport, she flirts with Hector. 

Will it go anywhere? 

When Ava mentions her desire to look a particular way, Hector responds But aren’t you about 50?

And so begins an absolutely beautiful exploration of beauty.

Alone, in her room, (it’s a two hander) Ava is visited by Aphrodite herself. (We’re told the goddess is the most beautiful of all because she was ranked us such by the man Paris.)

Aphrodite sings of being irresistible in a world that’s insatiable. She sings that externals are what matter. She promises power through beauty.

Under her spell, Ava responds I am my thick hair. I am my hairless body. I am my plump skin.

By now, of course, alarm bells are ringing for the audience. It’s a bold move to allow Ava, an academic, to be so reductionist in her thinking – but it’s indicative of the seductiveness of the worldview she’s being sold.

And with this evaluation by male standards ultimately questioned, it’s also a bold move to posit a man’s judgement as the catalyst of this doubt. It’s indicative of the ubiquity of the problem.

In some ways, the libretto by Laura Lethlean is a riff on feminist insights as found in such as Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. In other ways, it could be read as a reflection on ancient Greek sensibilities – the primacy of the body, the value of competition – compared with what I’ll call a Christian sensibility. (I’m thinking of the vision so miraculously shared by Dante, that the body and the soul are of equal value and only complete when together, and that Love is Charity rather than Eros.)

I’ve focussed on theme and concept, but direction by Alexander Berlage brings it all to glorious actuality.  The design by Isabel Hudson is outstanding, a lush domestic realism, ideal for the representation of both the luxury and commonality of sexuality. Under the video design of Morgan Moroney, the live feed marvellously evokes the concept of the gaze, of being always an object to be observed. It also facilitates our enjoyment of the extraordinary dramatic performances.

Both in voice and movement, Jessica O’Donoghue as Ava and Meechot Marrero as Aphrodite are utterly mesmerising. Their vocal performances are superbly nuanced to emotion: the exultation of sexual power, the languor of seduction, the agony of self-doubt.

Performed by Omega Ensemble and conducted by Jack Symonds, the music by Nico Muhly has a sense of melancholic sweetness (like Tennyson’s remembered kisses after death.) It ripples with the poignancy of distance; though a work about desire, we never see the lover.

After the revolution, lipstick will be lipstick. And that’ll be a good thing.

But, sometimes, I wonder.

Though this piece can be validly read as a strong and necessary feminist statement, it can also be viewed through another lens. Aphrodite takes on one of the great irresolvable tensions in the human condition (which is probably what makes great drama).

Everybody desires to be desired. At times, it’s as though we want to be an object. The active longs to be the passive, to be swept up in something beyond our small selves. Sexuality uses us, and we want to be used. It’s one way we find connection – with the community, or the Life Force, or whatever you want to call that which is bigger than us. It assures us a place in the chaos. Yes, there remains the deep wish to be appreciated as more than just a body, to be accepted as a full, complete, complex, independent, dynamic Other – but there, in the very heart of that wish, is the desire to be accepted. We want to be evaluated (even though we don’t.)

At only 60 minutes, Aphrodite is a wonderfully rich theatrical and musical experience.

Paul Gilchrist

Aphrodite music by Nico Muhly, libretto by Laura Lethlean

presented by Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriageworks in association with Omega Ensemble

at Carriageworks until June 28

carriageworks.com.au

Image by Daniel Boud

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The Half-Life of Marie Curie

18 Jun

It’s the summer of 1912, and Marie Curie’s good friend and colleague Hertha Ayrton invites her to England to escape the scandal that threatens to destroy her.

Curie has had an affair with a married man, and so now she’s not only a two time Nobel laureate, but also a home-wrecker. The second of these monikers, it would seem, trumps the first. (It can be difficult to believe the misogynistic, hypocritical rage directed at Curie. Or it should be. Unfortunately, history proffers too many examples.)

The wonder of Lauren Gunderson’s play is – that with a focus on this one brief historical moment, and with only two characters – she creates something of incredible beauty and richness.

The critique of the patriarchy is suitably sharp, but even more stimulating is the representation of the complexity of female relationships.

Firstly, there’s a depth to their experience of men. Institutionally, socially, at large, men are unjust: fearful little soulless moustached marionettes, incapable of granting women equality. But on a personal level, both women, now widows, have had husbands who were the best of humankind. William Ayrton called his wife BG (beautiful genius) and Pierre Curie refused a Nobel Prize unless it was shared with his wife. Even Paul, the married man who Curie loves, for all his vacillation, offers an undeniable joy. And it’s worth noting that Ayrton has taken her first name from a poem by a man: “Hertha” by Algernon Swinbourne. His poem, she says, gave her the courage to believe in her own worth as a woman.

And secondly – for those concerned the play might not pass the Bechdel Test – (it does, with flying colours) – the friendship between the two woman themselves is portraited brilliantly. There’s fierce loyalty and honest admiration. There’s shared humour (and whisky) and the glory of two top class minds in conversation. But there’s also an unspoken (delightful and light-touched) homoeroticism. And there’s an argy-bargy that sails awfully close to bullying. Ayrton asserts that Curie is strong, is resilient, can transcend the scandal – but she asserts it just a little too often. Curie is wounded. She doesn’t know who she is anymore, and being told you’re an otherworldly goddess, when you’re feeling so very human, is akin to erasure.

Directed by Liesel Badorrek, Gabrielle Scawthorn and Rebecca Massey give utterly engaging performances. They play each note of Gunderson’s script with a meticulous awareness of its possibilities, bringing to the fore both the delicious humour and the deep humanity. Scawthorn’s Curie is a terrific portrait of power in pain, fraught but ever able to inspire awe. Massey’s Ayrton is beautiful bustle, fire-hearted affection, and no nonsense determination. On a stripped back stage, the physicality of the actors is paramount, and these two are extraordinary: powerfully embodying both suffering and exultation.

(This is probably the time to mention design. James Browne provides a raised transparent podium, which can be encircled by a transparent curtain. It’s spare but layered, aligning with a script that presents a seemingly single, simple historical moment only to reveal its complexity. The choices of lighting designer Verity Hampson and projection designer Cameron Smith wonderfully evoke this complexity – as well as the unseen physical forces that these two scientists explored.)

I was saying Curie is feeling so very human – with all the vulnerabilities and vagaries that entails. And that’s why Gunderson chooses this moment to set her play. Gender tensions might be crucial to the piece, but so is another tension: that between the supposed objectivity of science and the unavoidable subjectivity of the people who work in it. Curie says she loves science, but not scientists. Both women muse on the fact that proof is real, but recognition is political.

And just as the tension between the sexes is represented with a humane richness, so is this tension between knowledge and its knowers. The women’s belief in inviolable proof is undercut by their greatest conflict. The spoiler rule prevents me giving detail about the moment, but the tension is one in which scientific findings are disputed, where two passionate, intelligent women debate when – and if – knowledge can ever become complete. Truth maybe immutable, but Science remains an all too human endeavour.

Constructed from such vital tensions, and presented with such mastery, Ensemble’s production of The Half-Life of Marie Curie is superb theatre.

Paul Gilchrist

The Half-Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson

at Ensemble Theatre until 12 July

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Eureka Day

5 Jun

Set almost entirely in the P&C meetings of a primary school, you might assume this is a fun satire of contemporary society.

And you’d be right. Eureka Day by American writer Jonathan Spector is extraordinarily funny. But it doesn’t just make fun, it confronts one of the biggest rifts in our culture.

Eureka Day Elementary is a school built on social justice and inclusivity: a place where everyone feels seen and heard; a place where decisions are reached by consensus; a place where all points of view are valid.

The last of these is the issue. (And possibly the second last.)

Eureka, of course, means I have found it! – and there’s a sense that’s what the P&C believe: that their place is special, that it encapsulates, somehow, the perfect way forward.

But, for all their good intentions, it doesn’t.

Watching their meetings – bursting with thoughtless condescension, moral pedantry and obsession with policy, yet empty of soul-felt kindness, honest humility and genuine openness – is utterly painful. Yes, it’s hilarious, but it’s also excruciating. Earlier, I called the piece satire, but that genre usually employs hyperbole to make its point. But there’s no exaggeration here; it’s just the reality of our present day.

(A reality that feels like one of the rings of punishment in Dante’s Divine Comedy, one in which we’re condemned to an endless repetition of what seem to be absurdities but are actually perverted echoes of our true sins. However, I do think it’s a ring of Purgatory we’re stuck in, rather than Hell; we are purging ourselves; things will improve; there’s no need to abandon hope.)

There are beautiful moments in the piece where our societal problem is artfully diagnosed. One parent jokes that her daughter was very smart but also good-natured, so they knew she would become a benevolent dictator. Another compliments the work of a mime artist, for his subtlety and, we can only imagine, for his rare ability to just remain silent. Another parent says it straight out: she’s sick of the hubris.

This hubris, the belief that they’ve found the correct way, is tested by an outbreak of mumps at the school. Can all decisions be made by consensus? Are all points of view really valid?

As a society, we’ve fallen in love with policy and forgotten politics. And by politics, I mean the sphere of life in which we have to work with other people (as against just shout at them over and over that they are wrong or evil.) The fact that this play centres on meetings where adults must come together and solve problems makes it essential viewing.

(Though I must admit, I’m a little uncertain about the play’s exploration of vaccination. This hot button issue threatens to overwhelm everything else, burying from common view the representation of the political sphere that I so value. But, yes, I know, I know, the dramatic form must deal in the concrete…)

Directed by Craig Baldwin, the production bubbles away at just the right pace, evoking the awful enervating reality we currently endure, yet still assuring us the dramatic boil-over is imminent.

Performances are excellent.

Jamie Oxenbould as Don, a school official, is perfectly, perpetually, and pathetically polite and patient.

Katrina Retallick as Suzanne is both wonderfully comic and deeply poignant, offering a rich portrait of an individual traumatised by the universe’s chaotic cruelty and who overcompensates with a commitment to control.

Christian Charisiou’s Eli is brilliant as the epitome of overtalking privilege, the misguided good that knows not when to stop.

Branden Christine as the newcomer to the school community is magnificent, presenting a fascinating study in intelligence encountering its nemesis: the holding back, the bitten tongue, the seductive whisperings of despair as we wait to speak the Truth.

Deborah An as May has a gloriously warm energy. Her character’s journey is perhaps the biggest of the play, and she pitches it superbly. Her speech in which she posits what she wants for her kids is a highlight, and represents the best of what the play has to offer: the petty hobgoblin of certainty dispelled by a courageous vision of hope.

With this production, Outhouse Theatre shows once again why they are a vital part of the Sydney scene, presenting work that dares to walk our societal fault lines, and keeps its balance with honesty and humour.

Paul Gilchrist

Eureka Day by Jonathan Spector

Presented by Seymour Centre & Outhouse Theatre Co

At Seymour Centre until 21 June

seymourcentre.com

Image by Richard Farland

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Heaven

19 May

This is a beautiful play, beautifully presented.

Written by Irish writer Eugene O’Brien, it tells the story of a middle-aged couple at a crisis point, and it does so with humour and insight.

Kate Gaul’s direction is wonderfully simple, unaffected in a way that allows the brilliance of the writing and performance to shine.

The piece is constructed from two intertwining monologues. Husband and wife Mal and Mairead attend a family wedding. The couple seem to get on well, but they’re never shown speaking to each other because each is in the process of exploring something that will challenge their relationship. Fitting the setting, that challenge is sexual.

Mairead has met an old flame, the man with whom, in her twenties, she had the best sex of her life. Mal is confronting his repressed homosexual desires.

The title? Heaven? Do they both seek a joy that will utterly transcend their merely comfortable relationship? Have both become aware that Eternity fast approaches, with its mysterious, unsatisfying promise of either oblivion or pleasures of a less certain nature?  

In contrast to the metaphysical connotations of the title, both characters use very physical metaphors to express their needs and doubts, underlining that they’re far from finished with this plane of existence. She asks is this where my 50 years has lead? He wonders whether he has the courage to enter the world below, the lower dimension.

Because of my peculiar (and un-Australian) penchant for digging into metaphor, I should make clear that the play is not in any way religious (except what it has in common with all serious philosophies: an awareness of the tension between our inner lives and our outward relationships.)

This is, however, modern Ireland, and the hand of Catholicism is still heavy. Mairead tells of going to England for an abortion. Mal’s sexual fantasies are couched in the language of his desire for Jesus, effectively suggesting the complexity of his emotional situation, its guilt and its passion.

As the couple, Lucy Miller and Noel Hodda are absolutely superb.

Miller’s Mairead is gloriously tough. She doesn’t edit her speech. She’s a proud playground bully. She’s utterly disdainful of her daughter’s choice of partner. Reflecting on the death of her abusive father, she hisses that cancer sometimes takes the right ones. She’s deeply sensual and unafraid to fulfill her needs. Yet, she never speaks a word against Mal. It’s a magnificently rounded portrait, strength sparring with uncertainty, delivered with captivating power.

Hodda’s Mal is gentler, softer – desirous of the direction Mairead gives his life. Hodda plays the humour of the-dag-who-dares with consummate skill, but also marvellously portrays the internal battle between desire and doubt.

It’s a temptation with a production like this to be so taken by the skill of the makers that you forget the meaning, that (to mangle Yeats) you fall in love with the dancers, and forget the dance. But this production – an exploration of the tension between our inner and outer worlds, epitomised in its presentation of a marriage under threat – achieves the perfect marriage between artistry and Art.   

Paul Gilchrist

Heaven by Eugene O’Brien

Presented by Bitchen Wolf

At the Loading Dock Qtopia, until May 31

qtopiasydney.com.au

Image by Alex Vaughan

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In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play

14 May

Written by American playwright Sarah Ruhl in 2009, this sits curiously between farce and something more serious. (I was going to write something more valuable, but who’s to say laughter isn’t worth more than all the world’s profundity?)

Set in late nineteenth century America, in a doctor’s residence and surgery, the play tells a tale of treating “hysteria” with the newly harnessed electricity. Dr Givings employs what we would call a vibrator, and his treatment is rather popular.

Though this farcical element is approached with true comic commitment by the cast, there’s a danger of it all slipping into a one-joke piece. We see the vibrator and its associated technology used on “patients” possibly a few too many times. (Though I have friends who would never tire of such a joke.)

And the basic conceit of the humour, that no-one seems to realise the “patients” are being sexually aroused to orgasm, is a challenging one to accept. Though the medical discourse of the time was dominated by myopic patriarchal attitudes, were the women themselves so very ignorant of their own bodies? Perhaps. Or perhaps the hegemonic discourse simply prevented open discussion. But theatre enables the representation of many discussions that would not otherwise be open. (It could be argued that’s part of its charm.)

But I guess it’s how the piece gains the first of its feminist credentials: if the diagnosis is that the female experience is so entirely dominated by patriarchal perspectives, then revolution is the only appropriate prescription.

And the piece gains its feminist credentials in other ways, representing aspects of the female experience that (still) could do with more cultural airtime. As well as orgasm, we’re shown breast feeding and the terrible fears of childbirth. As Catherine Givings says of the last of these experiences No rational person would go through this twice. This production also powerfully presents the anguish of child-raising, beginning with a desperate Catherine looking on helplessly as her new-born child just … won’t … stop … crying. She muses that it’s odd that Jesus was a man, one who supposedly gave his body in the eucharist, because it’s women who are eaten.

And this religious allusion leads me to consider the other great theme of the piece: the relationship between spirit and body. Electricity has long been associated with spirit, but in finally being harnessed, one more of the universe’s grand mysteries is reduced to a mere human tool. In the face of advancing scientific knowledge, what will become of other great mysteries, like love? Is love any more than pleasure? And is pleasure any more than mechanical? Will the brave new world of technology make us smaller? No, We will be Gods asserts Catherine, but in her lonely desperation she’s compared to a fallen angel. Ruhl builds on this motif, with characters making snow angels. And what is an angel? Spirit without body. Traditionally and conventionally, this is somehow seen as closer to the divine. Yet in the next room, we’re being shown the joy the body can offer. That body and spirit are not mutually exclusive is the salvation these characters must find – and the final (snowy) image of the play is glorious. 

Director Emma Whitehead elicits some terrific performances from her cast, and that’s no mean feat, considering the demands of a script constructed from such dissimilar genres. (Though the reading of the play I outline in the previous paragraph leaves me wondering if some genuine nudity might’ve been a good choice. I also wish the script had given some of the characters more lines to express their fears and enthusiasms, which would not only have made a wonderfully rich play even richer, but – counterintuitively – would have facilitated a quickening in pace that sometimes the production needs.)

Alyona Popova as Annie, Dr Givings’ assistant, gets too few lines, but with what she gets she displays fitting dignity and impressive poignancy. Ruva Shoko as Elizabeth, the wet nurse, has a slow build, but when she gets her big speech she is deeply moving.

Luke Visentin as Leo, the artist who is a male sufferer of “hysteria”, is delightfully exuberant.

Catherine is the heart and soul of the piece, and Sarah Greenwood grabs the opportunity and gives a performance that is utterly superb – funny, fraught and full of life-affirming energy.

Paul Gilchrist

In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl

At New Theatre until 17 May

newtheatre.org.au

Image by Bob Seary

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Various Characters

9 May

I’m not a fan of Australian theatre’s obsession with teenagers. For me, it suggests a tiresome childishness in our intellectual outlook, a mawkish nostalgia that resists adulthood, a fear of responsibility being allowed to trump the embracing of opportunity.

But I also know that childhood leaves no survivors*, and if you want to explore vulnerability (whatever its cause), the teenage years are a very good place to start.

And that’s what Šime Knežević does in his beautifully written Various Characters, directed with skilful subtlety by Victor Kalka.

Set in Western Sydney in the early 2000’s, most of the characters are teenagers.

Nina (Georgia Da Silva) has lost her mother and is living unhappily with her aunt. She desperately wants to visit her sister in Melbourne, but she doesn’t have the cash. The solution? Sell the dog. But she can’t sell it to just anyone; it has to go to a good home. Both touching and funny, this initial scene operates as a perfect symbolic introduction to the wider problems the characters face: insecurities that threaten to degenerate into desperation.

Knežević captures the teenage voice brilliantly (though some of the actors go a little overboard in their embodiment of youthful apprehension and would benefit from greater vocal projection.)

Da Silva, Maliyan Blair, Nashy MZ and Tate Wilkinson-Alexander as the teenagers capture the age’s enthusiasms and doubts, and give performances that are both amusing and affecting.

The two adult characters seem only a small step away from children, a powerful suggestion that the challenges the teenagers experience are ubiquitous. After all, this is ethnically diverse Western Sydney under a conservative government (and, some would say, a perpetually conservative mono-culture.)

Dog-purchaser and police officer Raoul expresses the confusion of a man who has somewhat unwillingly conformed to the hegemony. Tony Goh’s portrait is simultaneously comic and pathos-inducing.

Greta has lost her job, but there’s a market at Bigge Park and she hopes to kickstart a business venture with a stall selling Croatian food. She was born in Australia, but is proud of her heritage and dreams of a community open-hearted enough to embrace and celebrate diversity. Kate Bookallil as Greta gives a splendid performance, evoking magnificently the character’s fierce determination and quiet despair.

Paul Gilchrist

Various Characters by Šime Knežević

Presented by Plus Minus Productions, in association with Virginia Plain and Flight Path Theatre

At Flight Path until 17 May

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Robert Miniter

*I haven’t been able to find the source of this quote.

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The Lover & The Dumb Waiter

8 May

Directed by Mark Kilmurry, this is an evening of two short works by the great Harold Pinter.

Everyone’s familiar with the famous Pinter pause, that cessation of dialogue that acknowledges the world’s incomprehensibility, and seems to respond with all the world’s malevolence.

These two works employ the Pinter pause sparingly, preferring instead a related technique: the gap in exposition.

Take The Dumb Waiter. Two hit men wait in a basement room for instructions regarding their next job. We don’t know who their target will be. We don’t know why they will be targeted. We don’t know who issues the instructions. The dumb waiter installed in the room delivers food orders as though from a café above, and we don’t know why these orders make the hit men so very anxious. Only one of these uncertainties is clarified in the course of the piece, but this clarification only births further uncertainties.

Kilmurry fully embraces the comic possibilities of the scenario, and Gareth Davies and Anthony Taufa play the hitmen with terrific humour. (If Tarantino hasn’t seen a good production of The Dumb Waiter, I’d be shocked.) But Davies and Taufa also poignantly convey a rising panic, a terror in the face of power structures they know exist but don’t understand.

And that’s what the gaps in exposition do: they invite us into a similarly disorientating, dangerous world; they ask us to consider whether it reflects our experience, as individuals who are neither impotent nor omnipotent, who suffer from arbitrary power but are also complicit in its tyranny.

If The Dumb Waiter is comic, The Lover is even more so. Richard and Sarah are husband and wife, but she openly has an afternoon lover. Davies and Nicole Da Silva present this surprising couple with a delicious straight-faced matter-of-factness. Both performers glory in the particularly middle-class language Pinter gifts these characters, a dialect that’s precise yet euphemistic, fussy yet biting. Having presented an unexpected but believable relationship, Pinter proceeds, in splendid comic scenes, to reveal its complexities. But he never does so completely, once again allowing gaps in exposition to invite (or is it necessitate?) our full engagement.

Romantic love is an odd thing. We like to think that in it we can be our true selves, but simultaneously we are playing a role, that of the lover, the projection of the desires of the Other. Like Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, also first produced in 1962, The Lover expresses the collision of the desire for authenticity (the hallmark of the next two decades in Western culture) with the realisation that radical individuality might be a fantasy. Neither impotent nor omnipotent, we are complicit in the illusions from which we suffer – and our attempted solutions merely perpetuate those illusions.

Wonderfully performed and tremendously funny, this double bill is an excellent introduction to Pinter’s genius.

Paul Gilchrist

The Lover & The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter

At Ensemble until June 7

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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IRL

7 May

Alexei has been chatting with Thaddeus on Messenger for ages, but they’ve never seen each other, and now it’s time to meet in real life. (IRL)

Alexei suggests Supernova for their first date. He arrives in his customary Disney princess-style outfit. Before their rendezvous, Thaddeus is tricked out of his clothes by a mysterious woman. Alexei comes to the rescue, but without revealing his identity.

It’s a crazy fun comic set-up that puts centre stage the concept of personal authenticity. When is it appropriate to play roles, and when should we just be ourselves? (Whatever the second of those two options means.)

As the two young lovers, Andrew Fraser and Leon Walshe are utterly charming, finding both the humour and heart in Lewis Treston’s beautiful script.

But I have to admit, it was the juxtaposition of this romantic comedy with a second story thread that I found utterly fascinating.

Alexei’s best friend, Taylor, is now a TV celebrity, working in America with some of the biggest names in the industry. She’s scheduled to speak at Supernova, but the pressure created by the inauthenticity of the role she’s asked to play becomes too much. In a glorious theatricality akin to Harper’s choice in Angels in America, Taylor opts out – not by entering a fridge like Kushner’s character, but by joining some tropical fish in the deep blue (which I’m guessing is an allusion to Finding Nemo.)

While psychologically AWOL, Taylor’s body is inhabited by Phoenix, a super villain with a strong family resemblance to Marvel’s Thanos. (Bridget Haberecht is absolutely terrific in each of these incarnations.) Like Thanos, Phoenix is zealously committed to a grand mission – the Great Forgetting – which will free society from its obsession with pop culture and facilitate true authenticity.

It’s not as crazy an idea as it sounds: Phoenix makes clear the link between pop culture and capitalism – all the cosplay characters prancing around Supernova are owned by just six major corporations.

Ignoring the capitalism thing for a moment, do we need to be freed from stories?

Indeed, can we be freed from stories?

There are several elements of Treston’s very funny, very clever script that seem to posit liberty from stories as a longed for possibility. Taylor is uncertain about the validity of the whole acting game and dreams of more authentic employment. Thaddeus is in the closet, and crucial to his character development is the dropping of any disguise and the showing to the world his true identity. And the coming together of the young lovers – the emotional heart of the story – appears to necessitate the shedding of any performative behaviour if they are to find the real thing. The last of these is particularly curious. Is romance real? Or is it a social construct, built from all the stories we’ve been told? (I found myself comparing this piece with Stoppard’s The Real Thing, a play which clearly asks whether true love is, after all, just one more performance?)

What is our relationship with stories? Presented here in the most delightfully accessible way, it’s a serious philosophical question.

(Warning! Boring, self-indulgent, reviewer digression ahead! When religious mystics seek a genuine encounter with the divine, they reject or bypass institutional authority, yet still they recount their visions in the tropes of the dominant narrative. Christian mystics see Jesus, Hindu mystics see Krishna. Zen Buddhism bucks this trend, suggesting that in the attaining of enlightenment, all narrative is shed – but, in doing so, it only affirms the fundamental importance of story in everyday life. On a secular level, modern pragmatism also displays an hyper-awareness of narrative. Responding to a society that is more soaked in story than any other in human history, modern pragmatism posits philosophical irony: an acceptance that no grand narrative can be privileged, yet a life without a guiding narrative seems inconceivable. It’s ironic because we know our particular chosen grand narrative can’t be proven true but, in a consciously playful way, we commit to it all the same. Treston’s world of perpetual pop culture references, and of a Supernova forest of competing yet somehow compatible narratives, seems a close cousin to modern pragmatism. But I’ll get back to that forest very soon.)  

Director Eugene Lynch elicits exuberant, high-energy performances from his superb cast. The physicality and the mock fights are especially impressive, combining sound (Daniel Herten), lighting (Topaz Marlay-Cole) and movement (Cassidy McDermott-Smith) with hilarious precision.

So, that fairy tale forest ….. Ultimately, what does the play suggest our relationship with narrative should be?

Does it suggest we should outgrow cosplay? That we should dismiss story and live in something called reality?

All that seems too simplistic a reading, one that denies the characters’ obvious joy in performance, and one that’s blind to the production’s deliciously-sweet and invitingly-rich final image.

Paul Gilchrist

IRL by Lewis Treston

Presented by The Other Theatre in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre

At KXT until 10 May

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Justin Cueno

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Silent Sky

26 Apr

This is an engaging production of an extraordinarily beautiful play.

Written in 2011 by American playwright Lauren Gunderson, Silent Sky tells the story of astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Despite the patriarchal prejudices of the early 20th Century, Leavitt made paradigm-shifting discoveries in her field.

Her work was crucial in determining the distance to faraway stars and has helped us appreciate that our Milky Way is merely one galaxy among many. Thanks to her, and those who developed her insights, we’ve been offered intimations of the true majesty of the universe.

Though obviously critical of misogyny, Gunderson does not reduce Leavitt to a woman solely defined by this challenge. The play is an enchanting exploration of vital ideas, ones that offer liberation beyond the passing evil of patriarchy. For simplicity, I’ll reduce these ideas to two, what I’ll call the two ‘P’s’.

The first of these ‘P’s’ is patterns. Like all scientists, Leavitt worked on the assumption that if the universe is to be comprehensible, we must find its patterns. The trick is to find the right pattern. Or, perhaps more importantly, not to commit to the wrong pattern. (Patriarchal prejudices are a perfect example of commitment to the wrong pattern, exacerbated by the fact that this misplaced conviction is ultimately self-fulfilling. If women have not proved great scientists, any assertion that they can’t be is indubitably one of the reasons they haven’t been.) True wisdom consists in being able to see patterns, but also in being able to see more than patterns. In philosophy, it’s the perennial battle between the systemisers and the existentialists, between those who are committed to a grand theory that explains all existence and those who are constantly startled into an invigorating awareness by existence’s inexplicability.

The other ‘P’ is perspective. Leavitt’s insight that helped calculate the distance to the stars was one of perspective: Does a star appear bright because it’s close? Or does it appear close because it’s bright? I won’t spend time explaining the science with which Leavitt solved this problem – but the playwright does it with a splendid lightness of touch that leaves her tale utterly accessible to all. And the motif of perspective is threaded cleverly through the entire work. Einstein’s theory of relativity – at the time new, fresh and controversial – reminds both the characters and the audience that no perspective can be automatically privileged. Perspective is about being maturely aware that you will inevitably suffer from bias, an unavoidable consequence of seeing the world from a particular place. And Gunderson uses the gentle friction between Leavitt and her sister to highlight the concept of perspective in a slightly different way. Margaret says You would think a world war would make the stars seem trivial only to be answered with You would think the stars would make a world war seem trivial. At another moment, Leavitt asserts Life is about being appropriately upset. Perspective is not just the awareness that there are competing points of view; it’s also about keeping one’s own multifarious experiences in mature relation to each other (what is commonly referred to as keeping things in perspective.)      

But I don’t want to give the impression the script is heavy – it’s not at all, it’s gloriously rich. Gunderson’s brilliance in telling this tale of magical wonder is that her touch is gentle, humorous and heart-warming, as soft as starlight.

Except for a couple of hiccups that can be put down to opening night gremlins, director Tracey Okeby Lucan’s production is captivating. The Theatre on Chester is a proscenium arch, but the limitations of this type of theatre are turned by Okeby Lucan into opportunities. The depth of the stage facilitates an appropriate sense of vastness, aided by deft lighting by Mike Brew and Milo McDermird and evocative design by Michael Arvithis and Okeby Lucan.

The cast do some great work. Angela Pezzano captures magnificently Leavitt’s determination and wonder. The scenes with her sister, played by Tida Dhanommitrapap, are sweet. As Peter, David Eisenhauer navigates the journey from nemesis to admirer and beyond with likeable humour. As Leavitt’s two colleagues, Annie and Williamina, Julie Moore and Anna Desjardins are excellent: Moore creating a gravitas inclusive of tenderness, and Desjardins a delightful, mischievous playfulness.

Paul Gilchrist

Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson

At the Theatre on Chester until 17 May

theatreonchester.com.au

Image by Carla Moore

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